The 2005 ~FAST Tex projects
College of Fine Arts

Title:
Digitizing Images for Teaching Islamic Art History at UT.
Part I: Ottoman Art and Architecture

Faculty Client:
Persis Berlekamp, pberlekamp@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Rachel Alvarado

Project Description:
To address short and long term objectives, Dr. Berlekamp wanted images for her classroom lectures to be assembled and accessible in a uniform format, thereby also increasing UT Austin’s visual resource collection.

The student developer created two types of digital images: ultra high resolution master images for archiving and screen-size edited images with detailed metadata for immediate classroom use. This was a collaborative project with the Department of Art and Art History’s Visual Resource Collection.

Title:
Sound Editing Practicum

Faculty Client:
Jim Buhler, jbuhler@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developers:
Calvin Kwong
Abram Bailey

Project Description:
To provide students with experience in analyzing sound production for a music course by completing an assignment to build the soundtrack of an “ambiguous” movie, creatively changing the mood, tone, and even genre, the project involved the acquisition and editing of a movie along with the acquisition and organization of an in-depth audio library, so students could gain not simply rudimentary facility in digital sound editing but also a better sense of how decisions about sound shape what we see in film.

Title:
UT Costume History Image Archive

Faculty Client:
Susan Mickey, msmickey@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Sarah James

Project Description:
To address the challenge of giving students a historical perspective, Mickey proposed to have a portion of the department’s collection of over 7,000 costume history slides scanned and digitized, labeled with detailed metadata, and put into an existing resource database for use by students and faculty, in a collaborative project with the College of Liberal Arts’ Instructional Technology Services.

Title:
Creation of Library by Digitizing Images

Faculty Client:
Cherise Smith, cherises@stanford.edu

Student Developer:
Edith Whitsitt

Project Description:
A new faculty member, by using slide and flatbed scanning as well as detailed metadata creation, built an easy-to-access collection of images for a course that had never been taught at UT Austin, in a collaborative project with the Department of Art and Art History’s Visual Resource Collection.

Title:
Phase 2: Using DVD Technology in the Teaching of Comedy Acting

Faculty Client:
Lee Abraham, labraham@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developers:
David Hartstein
Michelle Green

Project Description:
An old show business saying claims “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Because even the best student actors often struggle with comedy, project participants created a DVD designed to help students analyze comedic acting from moment to moment in any given performance, by watching and re-watching classic comic scenes with or without the instructional audio track and analyzing them according to guidelines provided by the instructor. Topics include comic structure, comic language, characterization, terms and techniques, and rehearsing and performing. This year’s project completed the main content for a set of six DVDs.

Title:
Digitizing Lecture Examples

Faculty Client:
Jim Buhler, jbuhler@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developers:
Nicole Auxier
Michelle Green

Project Description:
To address the problem of using numerous video clips on VHS tapes, project participants digitized clips from commercial DVDs, VHS tapes, and off-the-air VHS tapes for instruction, capturing, editing, and compressing more than 50 clips and assembling them on DVDs.

Title:
Learning to Listen: The Center for American Music Listening Library

Faculty Client:
Elizabeth Crist, ebcrist@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Scott Herrick

Project Description:
This project developed phase I of The Center for American Music Listening Library, which is intended to be a central resource for students enrolled in courses related to the history of American music. The CAMLL is a Flash- and XML-based site housing a wide variety of musical examples, from 17th-century psalmody to 19th-century minstrel tunes, early jazz, bebop, Motown, and hip hop.

Title:
Merging Multimedia on DVD

Faculty Client:
Stephen Slawek, slawek@mail.utexas.edu

Student Developer:
Melanie Conrad

Project Description:
The instructional problem was how best to coordinate audio, visual, and textual materials to elucidate music as culture for the History of Rock Music course. This project required capturing, editing, and compressing video and audio content in order to redesign PowerPoint slides for consistency, enhancing student engagement, and integrating more than 80 media files to provide an entire course’s lecture materials on DVD and minimizing the need to switch to different presentation tools during class.